Monday, December 12, 2011

Today's One Minute Writer: You have a time machine. What point in history will you never visit?

Just about every point, ever. I'm a woman. I have red hair. I like to be clean. I like being able to go to school and read and choose whether to stay at home or go off to work (sometimes that choice is a bit more theoretical, given the current economy, no?).

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On another note: I figured out how to watch What Not to Wear online. Begin me never accomplishing anything again, ever. I've always loved makeover shows. At the same time, I wonder why "we" buy into it all. And, yes, I totally buy into a lot of what they say. And, no, I don't dress the way they'd recommend. (I do remember they once let one guy shop at thrift stores. That'd definitely be one of my conditions...as if they'd allow me conditions.)

Sunday, December 11, 2011

It's been about two-and-a-half years since we became a one-car family. Most of the time, I'm okay with this decision. And, as I'm the one who made the decision, I probably should be. Every now and then, Cardo asks me if we should get another car, but I don't think so. We live in a small enough place and we can walk a lot of places we need to go.

When we had two cars, we spend more money. Not just in insurance and registration, but just in crap we didn't need. It was so much easier for me to just go to stores and spend money when we had two cars.

Every once in a while, though. Once in a while, I just want to scream when it comes to depending on others to get me where I need to go. Thursday, last week was just such a case. I left one place at 3:30 and didn't make it home until after six. I was exhausted enough and upset enough that I just wanted to cry. I managed to keep it under control, but barely. I tend to carry so much stuff with me (another topic for another time?) that I can't always comfortably walk all the way home. I love to walk, but not with sixty or so pounds worth of crap weighing me down.

And, here I am again, having to remind myself of my goals and figure out if they are still my goals.

And, later this week, there I'll be again, waiting for the bus to take me home. An hour-plus commute for a ten-minute trip. Ah, well. I am, overall, still grateful that I can easily access several busses and that there are day-passes and that I have a place to take the bus and all that.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Okay, seriously, who decided that December would just skip along? A moment ago, it was the fourth and now it's the ninth.* How did that happen?

In a lot of ways, I'm grateful to be as busy as I am. At the same time, I am, as always, striving for some balance. I know that I've said it before, but I'm kind of an all-or-nothing person. That just doesn't work here in real life, not even, I don't think, for those prodigy-type-people who seem to devote all of their time and energy to one activity. I mean, they have to do other things to live, right? Eat, drink, sleep, relieve themselves. At least those things.

Right now, I would really just like to tuck myself under my covers and catch up on my favorite blogs and look around on pinterest. I'd like to finish the book I'm reading. (I've been reading it since the end of October and if I keep up with my 10-pages-a-day schedule I'll be finished with it in the end of January.) I'd like to get the book I have on hold at the library and just devour it. (When I put it on hold yesterday, I was number 208 on the waitlist.) I would like to sleep until I can wipe out this exhaustion.

Basically, I'd like to do a whole day of resting and relaxing and spending time alone. It feels selfish, but that's only because it is. I think I'll try for a day like that sometime within the next month. I think that's an okay thing for me -- a parent/spouse/employee/et cetera, et cetera, et cetera -- to desire and make happen.

In the meantime, I think I'll head off to bed ridiculously early here. I have train rides and walking, planning and studying, laundry and dishes in my future. That calls for a good night's rest.

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* I seriously just typed that three times. It looks like the first three letters should rhyme with "pin." Ah.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an [newspaper] editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble -- the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day it is drag, drag, drag -- think, and worry and suffer -- all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done -- it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after twenty or thirty year's service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors have wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible.